It is a common boast of these slave-lords that they constitute a modern “chivalry,” derived from the “Cavaliers” of England, and reinforced by the “ennobling” influences of African Slavery.[380] This boast has been so often repeated, that it has obtained a certain acceptance among those not familiar with our early history, and even well-informed persons allow themselves to say that the conflict in which we are now engaged is a continuance of the old war between Cavalier and Roundhead. So far as it is intended to say that the war is part of the ever-recurring conflict between Slavery and Liberty, there is no objection to this illustration. But if it be intended that the Rebels are cavaliers, or descendants of cavaliers, there is just ground of objection. I know not if the armies of the Union, now fighting the world’s greatest battle for Human Rights, may not be called “Roundheads”; but I am sure that Rebels now fighting for Slavery cannot be called “Cavaliers” in any sense. They are not so in character, as their barbarism attests; and they are as little so historically.
The whole pretension is a preposterous absurdity, by which the country has been too much deceived. It is not creditable to the general intelligence that such a folly should play such a part. Unquestionably there were settlers in Virginia, as there were also in New England, connected with aristocratic families. But in each colony they were too few to modify essentially the prevailing population, which took its character from the mass rather than from any individual. The origin of Virginia is so well authenticated as to leave little doubt with regard to its population, unless you reject all the concurrent testimony of contemporaries and all the concurrent admissions of historians. There is nothing in our early history with regard to which authorities are so various and so clear. From their very abundance, it is difficult to choose.
The original “Cavaliers” were English; but it is an historical fact that the Rebel colonies were not settled exclusively from England. The blood of Scotch, Irish, Dutch, Germans, Swiss, French, and Jews commingled there, all of which is amply attested. Huguenots of France, cruelly banished by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, found a home in both the Carolinas. William Gilmore Simms, the novelist of South Carolina, in a history of his native State, after mentioning the arrival of the Huguenots, says: “Emigrants followed, though slowly, from Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; and the Santee, the Congaree, the Wateree, and Edisto now listened to the strange voices of several nations, who in the Old World had scarcely known each other, except as foes.”[381] From Hewit’s “Historical Account of South Carolina,” published in 1779, we have details of settlement by Dutch, French, Swiss, Scotch, and Germans, followed by the remark, “But of all other countries none has furnished the province with so many inhabitants as Ireland.”[382] A similar story is told of North Carolina.[383] Here is nothing of the boasted “chivalry”; and if we search the testimony with regard to the character and condition of these early settlers, the whole “cavalier” pretension becomes still more improbable, if not impossible.[384]
Even before English colonization had begun, and before Sir Walter Raleigh or Captain John Smith had landed on our coasts, the “temperate and fertile parts of America” had been proposed as a substitute for the prison and gibbet. I quote from a Dedicatory Epistle of Richard Hakluyt “to the right worshipful and most virtuous Gentleman, Master Philip Sydney, Esquire.”
“Yea, if we would behold with the eye of pity how all our prisons are pestered and filled with able men to serve their country, which for small robberies are daily hanged up in great numbers, even twenty at a clap out of one jail (as was seen at the last assizes at Rochester), we would hasten and further, every man to his power, the deducting of some colonies of our superfluous people into those temperate and fertile parts of America, which, being within six weeks’ sailing of England, are yet unpossessed by any Christians, and seem to offer themselves unto us, stretching nearer unto her Majesty’s dominions than to any other part of Europe. We read that the bees, when they grow to be too many in their own hives at home, are wont to be led out by their captains to swarm abroad, and seek themselves a new dwelling-place.”[385]
This recommendation, associated with the names of Hakluyt and Sydney, was followed,—with what success you shall know.
I begin with the early patron of Virginia, Lord Delaware, who, after visiting the colony, described the people there, in a letter dated at Jamestown, July 7, 1610, as “men of distempered bodies and infected minds, whom no examples daily before their eyes, either of goodness or punishment, can deter from their habitual impieties or terrify from a shameful death.”[386] Little of chivalry here!